The gore gore girls Reviews

Herschell Gordon Lewis' final feature is so crudely lensed and unrelentingly violent that it's tempting to believe the whole thing was made solely as a prank. Swinging wildly between tasteless gallows humor, a bevy of bored-looking strippers going through topless routines, and the most extreme ultra-violence of Lewis' (or any other) career, The Gore Gore Girls is a fascinatingly sick swan song. The gore effects are cheap and by themselves utterly unconvincing, but the sheer brutality inflicted upon these meat-covered mannequins and sheep eyeballs is enough to render disgust through mere suggestion, a triumph of sorts for the power of imagination. Faces are hacked at and deep-fried, nipples are snipped off, and heads are squished like melons, all to the tune of jaunty marching-band music. The juxtaposition of these scenes with the silly, comic tone of the rest of the film is jarring and further impersonalizes the savagery that the audience has just witnessed. While Lewis has incorporated humor into most of his films, this is the first that seems played wholly for laughs, as suggested by Henny Youngman's inexplicable supporting role as a strip-club owner. Splatter fans are encouraged to test their mettle against the audacity of The Gore Gore Girls. Lewis began his horror career as a groundbreaker and ended with a film that he surely knew would be hard to top.